


What Severus Was Doing

by Turnpike



Series: Unbecoming [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Dark Magic, Nonbinary Character, Parselmouth Harry Potter, Vampire Turning
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-11-06
Updated: 2015-11-06
Packaged: 2018-04-30 06:55:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,229
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5154473
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Turnpike/pseuds/Turnpike
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When the Potter girl is abducted by Voldemort, Severus will sacrifice anything to find her--including his humanity.</p>
<p>A companion piece to 'Unbecoming'.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What Severus Was Doing

**Author's Note:**

> For those of you unfamiliar with my work, enjoy the story! 
> 
> For those who read 'Unbecoming'...   
> So, I've been unhappy with some of the gaps in 'Unbecoming'. As it evolves, I'm realizing more and more of the things I've left unexplained that might be necessary to make it a cohesive story. Being a fairly novice writer though, I'm not sure what parts of my additional material need to be in the story... and what will get edited out.   
>  So for now, the 'other' pieces--what happened to Severus in those two months he was looking for Heather, what's up with the man in Magnus' bedroom, and all those other unresolved oddments--are going to be stashed here until I figure out what to do with them.
> 
> Cheers!

I will find you. I will sacrifice my dignity and my self-respect and my integrity, forswear all other commitments, will become what I abhor for your sake. For you, Lily's daughter, I will kiss the hem of the one who murdered your mother, will kill and torture the innocent, will consort with those who repulse me. For you--for you, I will gain Voldemort's trust in torturing half the Order if I have to, and keep it by killing the rest.  
For you, I will become the monster I might have become, except for your mother. Only for you.

\--Severus, Chapter 1 of Unbecoming.

___________________________________________________________________________________

He did not return home that night.

He returned to that place all men for whom desperation is a chronic illness know best: the bar. But this particular bar sat in the dead end of a dark alley, and the cure it offered for his particular desperation was not to be found in the bottom of a glass.

He deliberately tore his finger on the rusty hook poking out of the wall—the usual inhabitants of this particular shop weren’t too concerned about tetanus—and allowed his blood to drip down the wall.

Reality split.

As a child, before Tobias Snape had gone on disability, lost his job, and became an alcoholic, his father had read bedtime stories to him. Best of all were the stories of Madeleine L’Engle. Tesseracts, wrinkles in time, wormholes. Even to a wizard child, they seemed impossible to him—even as his father explained black holes, geodesics, warps in the weft of space. That was magic, and the silence in the planetarium on clear nights echoed the hush of cathedrals.

He’d spent his Hogwarts years trying to recreate that early wonder. This was one of the few places where it presented itself. The hollow in the wall before him looked like the space between stars.

He allowed himself a pause to appreciate it, and stepped forward. 

It felt horrible. If he could have thought, if he’d had any mind at all at this point, he would have drawn another simile from his childhood books and said it was like when the ships travelled through the wormholes in ‘My Teacher Flunked the Planet’. He was disassembled, lying inert, and he could have been there a moment or an eternity before he felt a god molding him back together again. 

He came to lying on his back, with his head in a familiar lap and a familiar hand in his hair, and the low chuckle of the being holding him.

“Severus,” the—man—said, his name baritone deep on the first syllable, lilting to the alto on the end.

He knew better than to move, better than to stiffen. He was here to beg a favor, after all, no matter how reluctantly. He eased into the touch with the practised comfort of a spy—or a whore— and arched his neck prettily. He didn’t need to see the man’s face to imagine the features moving and melting, for in a moment, his own hands held him, and he heard his voice from another’s lips.

“Oh, Severus,” laughed the man again, easing out from under him, to sit alongside him, so that he could see his own face twisted in unnatural glee--“Severus. So compliant. This is a change—“ and his voice tilted to the soprano, as he took a shape Severus hated to see him steal—“Come to take me up on my offer?” she asked coyly, identical to the Lily of Severus’ memories.

A metamorphagus. Every magic has its price, and some say the price of theirs is selfhood. The more perfectly you became someone else, after all, the less you were yourself. The more they used the magic, the less they remembered of their own identity. 

The price was paid incrementally, but it added up all the same. Nymphadora Tonks tripped over her own body, lost in the memory of the tens of others she’d inhabited. This was a lesser price. It would be worse, far worse, when she could take one shape and forget the last one she’d walked in. A hundred years, and most metamorphagi forget what they’d looked like to begin with. A thousand, and some forgot who they had been.

Severus did not know how old Janus was, but it was old enough for her to have forgotten her gender. He thought of the being’s sex as whatever it was at the time.

“Not that offer.” Janus interrupted his train of thought, as she cocked her head, grew a beard, was abruptly Dumbledore.

“But then what can I do for you, my dear boy?” he asked, pulling himself up off the ground to sit on an old chair. “Would you like cake? Cookies?” Janus sneered, it ruined the effect. “Lemon Drops?”

“I’ve come to talk to your masters,” Severus said bluntly. “If you would.”

Janus pouted, with the face of a little girl. “You’re no fun.” She ran off towards the darkened stairs, seemingly unbothered by the fact she’d left her overlarge man’s robes behind. The other patrons, deeper in the room, gave her no heed. “Elizabeth! Drake! The dark one’s here to see you!”

He sat up and moved himself behind a table while he waited. 

The room was uncomfortable. It was large and dark—so large that it gave the impression of going on infinitely in all directions, bounded only by ceiling and floor. There was a light over the bar and above the stairs, and small candles at the tables near the bar, but everything else was in shadows. It was the kind of place that gave you the feeling not that you were being watched, but that you were about to killed by some nameless thing and forgotten in this place where time was not.

He staunched his still-bleeding finger with the clean napkin. A beautiful woman with a wide smile seemed to float to him between the tables, and handed him a goblet of white wine.

“Clean your cut, love. ‘Twould be a shame for my Potions Master and the girls’ favourite donor to die of blood poisoning.”

He held her gaze as she took the seat across from him, and deliberately, daring her to look, mixed the drink with his finger. The alcohol—20 proof if he weren’t mad—stung to the bone, but his gaze didn’t waver. Hers did, seemingly entranced with the twin streamers of blood curling through the alcohol.

He pulled his finger from the cup and passed it to her before she could ask, noting that it bled more freely than before.

“You spat in my drink,” he observed neutrally.

“I’m told that happens often in these times when one insults the serving staff,” she laughed, inhaling gently to savour the smell. “One day, you ought to take up Janus on his offers. He can be—“ she sipped the wine, “delicious.” She smacked her lips lazily, twirling the goblet to stare longingly at the remnant caught at the very bottom of the cup, as though contemplating how much effort it would be to break the glass for those last drops.

“So, Severus. You need to talk to me.”

He stilled. Blood remembers, and she’d just drank his. She should know.

“Yes. Yes, you need to talk to me.” Her eyes opened dangerously. “You would dare petition us for that?”

“Petition? Yes. Beg even, if I have to.”

“Acolytes do not come to us,” she hissed. “We choose them.”

“Choose me.”

“You never listened, boy,” she snapped. “Not in the nights you served my daughters, not now.”

“And why not?”

Her finger played with her lower lip, exposing the sharp planes of her incisors. Her other hand went to his arm. 

“When I create, boy, I prefer a blank canvas.” Her long nails rested on the dark mark. “I create loyalty to my house, and mine alone. You have already been worked over by other masters. Their magicks will impair my own.”

“Then take me. Clean me of any ‘impurities’. Make me what you will.”

“What is it you want, boy, that two masters can’t give you?” She paused, pondering, eyes brightening, and his heart sank deep as the darkness under the floor. “Ah. A girl.” Her smile was unamused, her focus predatory. “How droll. There is a theme to your unhappiness, Severus. Strive for more originality with your problems.”

“It’s not like with Lily—“

“Of course. Of course not. Lily Evans was simpering proper. This girl—have you anything of hers?” 

He did not answer. His blood would give her any answers she required.

“But of course you have. The necklace. Hand it over, boy, before I turn you upside down and shake out your pockets.”

Swallowing, he passed it over. She popped the peridot into her mouth, the cord hanging down her lips, and moved it about.

“Ah, yes,” she mumbled, talking around the stone. “Yes. Much better.”

“What,” demanded Severus, gripping his chair white-knuckled.

She sucked on the cord. “The blood on this cord is disgusting—small-minded woman it was, whatever animus in her body was nothing more than an animal might have. May as well suckle a swine teat, I’d have a better meal. The sweat beneath it though—it tastes of dreams, dreams that crowd out realities and make them their own—ugh—“ she spat suddenly. The stone flew into the goblet and shattered it. Elizabeth gagged suddenly, turning aside from her chair.

“What?” Severus demanded, rising from his own seat, helpless to know what to do. “What?” Vampires did not need to breathe, therefore, they did not choke. Did they? She continued to gag, and then to vomit, brown clots spilling out between her hands to soak into the wooden floor. He stood aside, as the patrons took notice, coming to aid the Lady of the House, while the thunderclap of feet descending the stairs in a bare second told him Drake was there before the man grabbed him by the throat.

“What did you do to her,” the man demanded. He didn’t look like a man now, mind. He looked like a desiccated corpse, grey skin stretched taut as leather over bone, eyes large and bright as a Beltane fire burning in his skull. He shook Severus. “What did you do!”

“Poison,” gasped Elizabeth from the floor, her hands coated with the brown and black of old blood. 

“Poison?” gasped Severus.

“Poison?” hissed Drake, throwing Severus to the floor with a force that broke his bones. He screamed shamelessly. Drake’s attention was not on Severus now though, it was on Elizabeth, dry-heaving reflexively, though it did no good. “What poison?”

What poison? wondered Severus through the pain. He had not been aware any poison could affect an adept of the Blood Magicks. And why and how could a cord from a Muggle household have a poison on it powerful enough to lay low Elizabeth Bathory?

It was becoming hard to breathe, and there were black spots in his vision. He strained to see Elizabeth, to hear her.

“Not the stupid boy,” she gasped. 

Severus thanked her for exculpating him, though he doubted it would do him any good now. What did vampires care if a normal wizard lay crushed and dying on the floor, when one of the greatest of their number was brought low?

“Elizabeth,” grated Drake, the monster’s gravelly voice full of something like sorrow. He cut his blanched neck, lowering it to her lips for her to feed, and she screamed, a sound like nails on a chalkboard, pushing him away.

“Contagious, I think,” she moaned. The other patrons backed away, but Drake clung tighter to her. She was beautiful no longer, as death-like as her husband, face wracked with agony as she searched her blood memories. “Ramses remembers this. Renenutet. She blessed the waters—poisoned them—and his brothers turned to dust. The girl that owned that necklace was a damned Parselmouth. I’m dying,” she sputtered, hacking up blood.

“I can help,” coughed Severus, his own blood spilling out with the words.

They ignored him.

“I can help!” he rasped, loud as he could, his vision blacking with the effort. “I can help!”

Drake spun and grabbed him by the collar. “What do you expect to do, boy, if I can do nothing? You lived a blink of an eye. Your memories are nothing next to mine.”

“Not memories,” Severus sputtered. “Skill. You called me, remember, called me for my potions, after the white wizards cut apart your son and sent him back to you bit by bit. You could sew him together but you couldn’t make him move again. I saw the way then. I see it now.”

“Make her live then!”

An ironic phrasing. 

“I’m dying,” Severus said simply. “What can I do?” He closed his eyes.

Drake growled, and abruptly, he felt teeth snap into the side of his neck, sharp as a snakebite, and the suction. He was lightheaded. He was light.

“Keep his heart beating,” he heard someone command. “The girls we picked up the other night. Bring them down here.”

An initiation. 

No one apart from the vampires themselves knew how vampires were made, though Severus probably had a better idea than most. Their bodies were changed somehow to use blood magic on an instinctual level, but that was all he’d known. Until now.

It wasn’t how he’d thought it would take place. It wasn’t how Elizabeth’s daughters had described it to him after Lily’s death, when he’d gone to them in a wizard’s kind of Russian Roulette. He’d pray they’d kill him and instead, they drained him dizzy, and then gossiped while playing with his hair. Mina bragged she had been courted by Drake, persuaded to him with bare sips of blood that did nothing for the hunger he’d invoked in her. He’d replaced her essence with his own gently, and she awoke from the dreaming on silk sheets.

This was ungentle as a nightmare.

They clamped onto him, throat and wrist and ankle, sucking at his blood, before slashing open his arteries length-wise, with careful and devastating speed. He was bleeding out, he was being consumed by them, then he was them, his blood curling through the capillaries that cradled their minds. He was Drake, he grieved for Elizabeth, he wanted to kill Severus, he wanted to kill himself—

And at the same time as he bled out, they bled into him. They’d torn open his crushed rib cage and cut open his right ventricle with surgical precision, fitted a funnel into it, bled into it and him—why couldn’t creating a vampire be as simple as drinking one’s blood, as those stupid Muggles always believed? But no. Vampirism wasn’t an ‘ailment’, but an art the darkest of wizards once practised upon themselves. And uncontent with that, had found a means to shape their childer to awaken potent as their sires. 

And somehow, through the pain, through the blood of thousands who were him and were not him, through the torment, he managed a fatal Occlusion. A tiny stroke, in a specific part of his mind, where a secret was stored. He’d remember it with enough blood if he emerged undead from this. For now, the blood bypassed that path. If he couldn’t remember it, the others would not.

The chanting began. It sounded like rocks grinding, and he realized it was his bones. It sounded like wet things gurgling, and he realized it was his flesh. It sounded like screaming, and then it did not, because his vocal cords had snapped. 

They dumped a girl by his face, bound. 

All magic has a price.

He remembered her. She wasn’t very bright, was she? Not in Potions. She did do her assignments on time, but her real love was Astronomy. He’d caught her in the Tower, not necking with the boys, like her friend the Chang girl, but studying star charts. 

He’d thought of explaining the stars to her as his father had him, thought otherwise. He wasn’t there to teach Astronomy, and most wizards were too damned arrogant to believe anything that wasn’t magic. But he’d left her alone, before giving Fred Weasley six weeks detention for making out on the lower balcony with Angelina Johnson. 

He thought of her focused gaze.

He thought of the girl in the picture, Lily’s girl.

He tore a hole in her throat to match the hole in his heart, and all that bright young life came flooding into his mouth, too much to swallow, too precious to waste, endless and not enough. It didn’t fill him. His hunger was infinite as void. 

Another took her place. Another. He swallowed and it leaked out around his lips and through his punctured arteries, and they kept chanting, and in between, they took the girls’ places, letting him drain them dry, before draining him dry in turn. It was forever and an instant before Drake said: “Enough.”

He could see still, somehow. He could see, and he was the blue-grey-white of a fresh corpse. Almost tenderly, Drake took up his head.

“Janus?”

The metamorphagus came forward in the shape of a solemn girl. An acolyte cut her arm. He watched as she bled into his chest.

Drake smiled.

“If you will not turn now, you will never turn.”

He set his lips back to Severus’ masticated neck, and began to draw for the last time. He pulled the blood from him, mouthful by mouthful, until the acolyte lifted his legs and the blood kept dripping from him. They spat in the black hole in his chest, and the hemolytic rinsed even the stain of life from him, and he watched all this through their eyes.

He didn’t understand how they were changing his body. He no longer cared. His life and memory was in them, divided amongst a dozen other lives now. And Drake’s mouth kept pulling on his neck, though he was dry and empty. Couldn’t he see that? But the vampire drank emptiness like man dying of thirst, until he threw Severus’ wasted body aside.

“Live, damn you!” Drake, scourge of Europe, screamed. “Live!”

“I warned him,” whispered Elizabeth. “He never listened.”

Drake let out an expletive that might have been Romanian, and kicked his corpse.

Things happen in empty places, in the spaces between stars, Severus thought somehow, though he no longer had a mind to do it with. On blank canvases. In void.

They do not happen by themselves though. They happen by an act of will. In the beginning, there was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God—

Will created worlds, and cut open the seams of reality. Will was its own magic.

He willed open the void in his chest, and it sucked him from the minds of the others and swallowed him and then his body, up to black mark on his arm, and he felt the tug of another’s will opposing his. The Dark Lord. Of course. He willed himself void then, every part of him, save the part that belonged to his master, and when Voldemort’s will would not budge, he tore himself off from that part.

He was nothing and everything, infinite potential, unseeing darkness.

He was himself.

And this ultimate self-assertion allowed him recreate himself from the void. He came to gasping, his body as it remembered itself, drained and torn. Moving between nonbeing and creation—the highest and simplest of vampiric skills—came at a price. The price was blood, the currency of life. And death, the assertion of your existence at the expense of another’s.

The acolytes rushed to him and undid their earlier savagery in a matter of minutes. They sewed shut his arteries and put his heart back together, and he could still feel its hollows, even he couldn’t see them anymore. They’d always be there. He moved his throat convulsively, his dry eyes asking to Drake.

“No, you bastard,” the vampire whispered. “You won’t get your first feeding from me.” He nodded at Elizabeth. “You’re so confident you can cure her, you’ll take first blood from her.”

He was going to be poisoned, and he might not be able to make an antidote—for her or him. Strangely, this did not bother him. He dragged himself to her, and drank deliberately from her neck, long draughts that invigorated rather than poisoned him. He could feel it heavy in his stomach, draining through valves that hadn’t been there before, into his heart.

And, of a miracle, his heart beat.

It beat, and the blood moved through him. Not enough. No. Not enough by far. He was going to die—again. He yanked at all the fragmented memories of healing through the blood arts he’d gleaned in drinking the others, and burnt away a litre of the blood in his stomach in applying them. 

He laughed suddenly with realization, as his tiny fatal occlusion was undone. He remembered.

“Enough!” Drake ordered, ripping him off Elizabeth. “You’ll kill her.”

Severus laughed drunkenly, grabbing the neck of an unused girl and drinking her down. It wasn’t that giving blood or taking life itself opened and closed void. It was the ritualistic act of self-denial and self-assertion. 

He wouldn’t begin to heal completely or produce his own blood for days yet. He’d need these lives now, for his escape.

Drake remained silent as he drained a first, and a second. On the third, he fidgeted. He pulled the fourth from his lips, and Severus snarled, a memory-instinct Drake himself had given him.

“You’re not poisoned, obviously.”

“I am.”

“You’re not lying on the floor. You said you’d help my wife.”

“She’s not poisoned either.”

“Then what—“

“Vampires are undead. It didn’t matter that her body was long past its expiry date, your magicks could always override it. Until now. She drank the Parselmouth’s sweat. Did you know snakes were associated with death and rebirth?”

Drake looked more furious by the moment. Severus continued with merciless candour.

“She’s alive—or struggling to be alive—while the magicks that sustained her body are disintegrating.”

“And you’re—“

“Alive too, I suppose,” he glanced over his limbs, marvelling. “My body hasn’t had time to rot, you see.”

“You said you’d fix her!” Drake growled, and the shadows lengthened on the floors, and he felt them close in on him. A minute or a life ago, it would have terrified him. Now, they could have been miles away, for all the fear he felt. For all they could really threaten him.

He would have laughed, if he’d been a stupider man, but he hadn’t lived through two wars by senselessly infuriating powerful men, nor by burning bridges.

“I made no promises,” he said honestly, “but your request is fulfilled. She lives. For now.”

The shadows stretched over him.

“As do I. I would take care in treating her,” he said casually. “If I am alive, and not undead, after drinking her blood—it’s possible the Parselmouth’s poison is still patent in both of us. It would disturb me, Drake, to see more of your childer fall to this sickness.”

The shadows shrank back, Snape’s warning clear. Whatever poison was in you, girl, it is now mine as well. 

On the floor, Elizabeth coughed out handfuls of dust, skin taut and grey as gangrene. Her fingers crumbling, twisting into ash, like the Pharaoh’s Serpents Tobias Snape used to light on Guy Fawkes Day. 

He wondered if the Dark Lord could affect the vampires in a similar way. He didn’t mean to find out. The Dark Lord had enough power, didn’t need to know about this. It was his secret—and he warmed. No, not his secret. Hers. And no one else knew. This piece of her belonged to him, and no one else.

He recovered the pendant from Elizabeth Bathory’s brittle hands, placed it over his neck again.

Drake was staring at him with anger, and something unexpected.

Respect?

“Your coming here destroyed the best childe I’d made in millennia.”

He stared back dispassionately.

“I choose childer who will be loyal to this house. I never would have changed you, not if all the suns burnt out in the thousand worlds and you were the last living thing. I told the girls you would be disloyal, and I was more right than I knew,” he glanced at Snape’s arm, to where he’d allowed the Mark to grasp back into his flesh the moment he’d reassumed Form from Void. “You have never been loyal to any master but yourself.” Drake came closer, close as breath, because they both knew Severus would not harm him, not now that his end had been achieved. “There is power in that,” Drake murmured. “Wait for our blood to settle. Perhaps, if I can ever forgive you for this, we can be powerful allies. Until that day—“ his lips drew back from his teeth, and his hand drew up his sword, but it swung through empty air.

As both knew it would.

Severus moved in, and out of non-being, and stood in the shadows of the alley. 

It was raining. The streetlights gleamed on the rain-stippled blacktop in a thousand reckless constellations, far as he could see. 

He smiled, and stepped through them, and into Riddle House.

**Author's Note:**

> Please read and review!
> 
> In other news, those of you who have not read Brandon Sanderson's 'Mistborn' series need to read it. Soon as you're done saying nice things to me in the review section. Let me summarize 'Mistborn' for you: Slaves using magic in a post-apocalyptic ghetto stage uprising against evil emperor. It works.


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